Melissa Etheridge goes home again on 4th Street Feeling

Jordan Zivitz, The Gazette10.30.2012

“I thought, ‘I need to get out of this town that doesn’t understand me,’ ” Melissa Etheridge recalls of her youth in Leavenworth, Kan. “Now, did the town not understand me? No, I didn’t understand me.”

MONTREAL — Between the emotional candour of her lyrics and her unguarded discussions of her personal life, it’s tempting to read every Melissa Etheridge song as autobiography. It’s not a reading the singer discourages.

Or, depending on the time frame, a teenager desperate for escape from her hometown. In the centre spread of 4th Street Feeling, Etheridge stands in front of a car packed with guitars, drums and paraphernalia. It doesn’t matter that it isn’t the same vehicle she recalls in the title track, reminiscing about her youth in Leavenworth, Kan., “when everything I had could fit into my Chevrolet.” This album is her transport to her previous life.

The tone of the new disc — Etheridge’s most organic and elemental by some distance — is reflective by her standards, with more emphasis on her own experiences than on the global heartache she has embraced in the past. But as proved by the outpouring of support after the singer came out in 1993, and after her cancer diagnosis in 2004, the personal can be universal.

“That’s been the joy and the delight I’ve discovered in my journey, is that the more personal it gets, the more it’s like, ‘Oh yes, that was me — that’s exactly what I did right there.’ … I think that’s beautiful. It makes me look at all art that way.

“I think that’s what art is like at its most truthful — when we know Van Gogh was in pain. We know why this art looks this way, why we feel this way when we see it. Because we know that pain. That’s what we do as artists: I am willing to put my pain on a canvas so that maybe it might make you feel better, because it makes me feel better when I do it.”

Etheridge’s therapy on 4th Street Feeling is centred on absolving her younger self of her restlessness. If there’s a wistfulness to her recollections of Leavenworth, it has less to do with nostalgia for the town and more to do with refusing to look back in anger.

“I think what happened is I turned 50 and I started looking back at my youth in a very different way,” said Etheridge, now 51. “I was propelled from my youth by (a feeling of) ‘Let’s get out of this town and go make it in the big world so you don’t have any problems anymore,’ and then you find that, ‘Oh, here I am, it’s still me and I’m in the big world, and I still have problems. And it wasn’t so bad back then, was it?’ The reminiscence and the wistfulness on the album was me incorporating more of myself and finding some peace inside myself.”

When Etheridge speaks of 4th Street Feeling coming from a personal place, she isn’t just referring to the lyrics. All the guitar parts are hers, from the lean southern licks in Be Real to the psychedelic fuzz of A Sacred Heart. It was an important step for an artist who refers to “taking more responsibility” for her music.

“Especially from my third album (1992’s Never Enough) to before this album, a lot of the parts and the instrumentation came from other sources. I felt like others’ musical influence or opinion was greater than mine.

“I worked with John Shanks on (2010’s) Fearless Love, and he’s Mr. Guitar — he does all the guitars. So many. I really have always enjoyed collaborating with him — I mean, I found him at (L.A. club) Madame Wong’s in 1988. But after Fearless Love, I went on tour and I started doing the songs with the band that I had. … I thought, ‘Now, why can’t I do this in the studio?’ ”

Etheridge’s dream of becoming a more versatile guitarist coincided with songs that look back to her dreams of a life in music. To listen to her talk of a youth when her much-discussed sexuality was an issue for more than the media, it’s clear the professional goal doubled as a personal escape.

“I thought, ‘I need to get out of this town that doesn’t understand me.’ Now, did the town not understand me? No, I didn’t understand me. The town — everyone was doing the best they could at the time. So I conjured this dream of, ‘Well, I’ll be a rock star and that way I won’t be weird.’ Or ‘I can be weird because I’ll be a rock star.’ ”

It says a lot about Etheridge, one of the most plain-spoken and down-to-earth of artists, that her onstage alter ego ended up being herself. “How courageous am I, just to be myself?” she said with more wonder than braggadocio. “I have honours and awards for it. It’s the funniest thing.”

With her younger self’s dream a long-established reality, and with a long-established confidence in her identity off and on stage, Etheridge says “I, too, had to realize that diversity is what creates oneness in all of us. That we’re all diverse, we’re all one.” Including, in her view, those who would challenge the rights of the gay community.

“I completely understand the fear generated in the human psyche, and how fear can dictate what your beliefs are. You can believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that someone is wrong — it’s in the belief system that you have set up. So non-acceptance is not weird to me. I completely understand it. And it’s causing them a lot of pain, so I actually have a lot of empathy for people who resist any diversity in the world.”

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